I really like Beniger

by Sebastian Benthall

I’ve been a fan of Castells for some time but reading Ampuja and Koivisto’s critique of him is driving home my new appreciation of Beniger‘s The Control Revolution (1986).

One reason why I like Beniger is that his book is an account of social history and its relationship with technology that is firmly grounded in empirically and formally validated scientific theory. That is, rather than using as a baseline any political ideological framework, Beniger grounds his analysis in an understanding of the algorithm based in Church and Turing, and understanding of biological evolution grounded in biology, and so on.

This allows him to extend ideas about programming and control from DNA to culture to bureaucracy to computers in a way that is straightforward and plausible. His goal is, admirably, to get people to see the changes that technology drives in society as a continuation of a long regular process rather than a reason to be upset or a transformation to hype up.

I think there is something fundamentally correct about this approach. I mean that with the full force of the word correct. I want to go so far as to argue that Beniger (at least as of Chapter 3…) is an unideological theory of history and society that is grounded in generalizable and universally valid scientific theory.

I would be interested to read a substantive critique of Beniger arguing otherwise. Does anybody know if one exists?

Thanks, I would be interested in a further articulation of this. Does firm scientific grounding absolve a theoretical inquiry from ideology – what about the ideological framework that the science itself has grown in and is embedded in? Can we ascribe such neutrality to science?